The Demon's Revenge (The Fay Morgan Chronicles Book 4) (8 page)

“So you opened the door?” Lila asked.

“He’s Merlin, of course he opened it,” Adam said.

Merlin frowned. “The door opened all on its own when my fingers brushed against the doorknob. Wild energy and darkness came out as the door inched open, and I longed to see the land within. At first there was only darkness, but then I saw a three-headed dog across the river standing beside a gate. I recognized Cerberus, the guardian of Hell, and knew where this door led. I also felt that were I to step inside, everything could change for me, in a more profound way than in any other realm.”

“Because you would die,” I said.

He nodded slowly. “Yes and no. I would enter the realm of death and have nothing more to do with the living, yet I would continue to exist. For in every story of that place, existence continues on even if one becomes a miserable shade of what they once were. A shambling parody. I admit to a deep curiosity about that realm. I can still feel the call of its deep magic on my skin.” He closed his eyes and smiled. “I stood there for a while, giving myself time to decide if I truly wished to enter this last realm. Just as I was about to step inside, someone came out to meet me.”

“Who?” Lila and Adam asked at the same time.

“A man,” Merlin said. “Or I should say, he looked like a man. With wings.”

His father, I guessed but didn’t say.

“He told me one day I would be welcome there, but today was not that day, and that when I did finally go to Hell, he would welcome me.”

“Why didn’t you enter?” I said, curious despite myself. “Why did you choose to stay here?”

He looked at me sharply. “There is no sunshine there. Were I to enter, I decided I would need to take my own sunshine with me, and therefore I must find it again.” He almost managed to not give me a reproachful glance.

I stood and paced toward the window, to take in the gray world outside and still the torrent of words I wanted to shout at him. Merlin knew nothing. Yes, he had suffered for my terrible decisions. The massive weight of that always sat squarely on my shoulders. There would be no forgiving the cowardly and afflicted being I’d let myself be. Unlike him, it wasn’t a lack of suffering I yearned for, but a rectifying of a wretched life lived too long. Immortals should earn their years, and I had done nothing to earn mine.

“So then what?” Lila asked. I turned and saw odd blue tendrils of magic gusting up around her aura like sun flares.

“Things were terrible for many decades more, though perhaps that was the nadir of my troubles, for slowly, here and there, I found my joy and purpose again.”

I wondered at those decades. Of how he had found a way out. I noticed the paper cut on my hand was bleeding again. Strange.

Merlin watched me hawkishly. He wore a knowing, almost mocking look. “You know, if you had let me speak to you over the last two months, there are things that I could have told you that might have given you some perspective.”

“I let you speak to me,” I said, and let a cruel smile cover my face. I hated the idea of him pining for me when I was gone. I had tried over the last two months to make him hate me, so I had attacked him. I had tried to set him free.

Something tugged within me. I felt the pull to the null place in the city. A calling to the portal that was the Hell-door. The door spell was complete.

At the same moment Lila flared brighter.

And someone knocked on the door.

“Pizza, this time for reals,” Lila said, and bounded toward the door, taking big leaps and grinning. “I’m so hungry I could eat it all!” A shimmery light surrounded her. Her skin pulsed with light and turned light blue. She laughed. “For reals, I might not share. I could eat all the pizza in the world!”

Merlin stood and came swiftly to my side. “Morgan. What’s happening? How can I help?” He turned a wary gaze toward Lila.

“Hungry,” Lila repeated. Steam rose out of her mouth when she spoke. “Oh. Weird.” She breathed out more heavily and grinned. “It’s like my insides are smoking!”

Adam sat up on the couch. “Babe,” he said. “You’re looking sort of… blue. Is it the spell? She’ll be okay, right?” he asked Merlin and me. His voice cracked.

“I don’t think so,” Merlin whispered. “How can I help her?”

“She’s changing.”

Merlin nodded curtly, keeping all his attention on Lila. He already knew she wasn’t human, but it had not been safe to tell him what she was.

Lila’s aura grew brighter, and it was hard to look at her in the center of all that light. “So hungry,” she said and reached to open the door.

The door slipped open the second she touched it, and I saw, too late, that gone was the white pressboard door dirt-stained with a thousand comings and goings. In its place stood a taller door made of a rich mahogany and carved with thousands of symbols and screaming images of men and women writhing in pain.

Lila had opened the door to Hell.

Someone stumbled out.

12

The Most Foolhardy of Schemes

Darkness billowed out around the form that fell out of the door. The door opened wider and leaked clouds of ink and shadow. Lila grabbed the door’s handle and tried to slam it shut. The portal that had opened so easily would not budge.

The man who had come through the door crawled forward on his hands and knees, groaning with every motion. His leathery hands were covered in bruises and cuts.

“Move away from the darkness,” I ordered Lila.

“Sure thing, boss,” she called out cheerily. She stepped away from it, glowing ever brighter.

I took a step forward, not wanting any of that darkness to touch me, but needing to protect me and mine. It swirled around my legs, hot and prickling. Merlin’s hand slipped into my own as he stepped forward, too.

“Here we are. Steady on, lass,” he whispered, and it was as though everything broken and terrible between us fell away for the moment. We would face this together.

A tortured, howling scream came from the door, and the figure on the floor curled up into a ball. I saw his face. It was the Spaniard, bruised and battered. Blood trickled down his neck and one eye was swollen shut.

“Diego,” I cried out.

He lay on the ground in a tangle of darkness and looked at me with unreadable eyes. “Morgan. Mi bruja,” he croaked. “The demons found me. And the new Queen?” He shuddered. “She has so many unders in there. I need help. So many good and kind and decent folk who were tricked and fooled by her silvered and forked tongue. By her
—
”

“Diego? Hey, how are you? Terrible, I guess. Yikes, hi,” Lila said. Her voice was high and she spoke so fast it was hard to follow her words. She stood at the center of a sun, so bright it hurt to look at her. She beamed within and shifted from side to side. Manic. Beyond manic, as she transformed. “Do you need some kind of help?”

“Lila, stop talking,” I said. I had no idea when she would be changed, and when she did, there was one thing I had to make sure happened.

“Sure thing, boss,” she giggled.

“I do need help, Lila,” Diego said. There was… something in his voice.

Lila pulsed brighter still, and the entire studio apartment was ablaze in light. She stood at the center of it, two feet taller than she normally was. A blue sheen covered her. Adam was trying to get as near to her as he could, but he still stood several feet away, shielding the light with his hands.

“There is no help for Diego the deserter ever again,” a voice spoke lightly, almost amused. The Queen of Hell emerged from the viscous black of the door, shrouded in darkness despite all the blinding light in the room. “He dared to come to my realm once and then leave? The former king was soft-hearted to let this Spaniard live in the realm of men. To walk in the light. Never more will he be free from Hell.” The Queen looked the same as before. Small, curvy, and pretty. Were it not for the cruelty etched onto her face, she would have been lovely. She looked a bit like the patasola had looked. The thought itched at me.

Lila giggled, a high and skittering sound.

I watched her for a long moment. She was still more human than not, as far as I could tell. “Say nothing,” I ordered her again. “Not until I tell you to speak.”

She nodded as she swayed from side to side.

I looked to Diego, to Merlin, and then the Queen. “You said
—
” My voice shook. I cleared my throat and banished my nerves. “You said you sought an ancient soul. In exchange for the unders of Seattle. I can help you in more ways than you could possibly imagine.”

“What an interesting offer,” the Queen said, and took a step closer to me.

Merlin’s fingers gripped mine. He whispered, “Wherever you go, I will follow, witch.”

“You knew?” I turned to him.

“Of course.”

“But you can’t, I won’t let you
—
”

Lila pulsed brighter and I felt it like a physical force battering into me, overtaking the darkness that pooled around my feet. I didn’t know what to do. It was all too much, all at once, but there was Merlin by my side, steadfast when I had no right or reason to expect he would be. Willing, as he had always been willing, to follow me into the most foolhardy of schemes, into Hell itself.

I smiled at him, and despite all my years, felt the trills of a girl in love for the first time. For the only time. For all the time I had left. Not much, I presumed.

“What is this?” the Queen asked. “Two for the price of one, that is how they say it in modern human parlance, yes? An offer of both the witch and the wizard.” She laughed prettily. Terribly. “Intriguing. Tell me more of your terms.”

“Just me,” I said. “But I will be at your side and bidding, as long as you promise that while I serve you no harm will come to any I love and Seattle will be a refuge from demons.”

The Queen smiled. Her eyes flicked toward Lila, and then returned back to mine.

Merlin’s hand squeezed tight in mine, enough so my fingers went bruised and numb. “The both of us, together,” Merlin said clearly. “We will make sure you rule long. We will be by your side. I will bring my father in line.”

It was my turn to crush his fingers in my hand.

“No. Just me,” I countered. “With Merlin comes all the court intrigues and machinations of a half-demon who has always lived enthralled by power. You think he would be any different in Hell? You do not want him in Hell. You do not want
—
”

“Adorable that you presume to know what I want,” she said and took one step, and then another, into the room. She went to where Diego lay curled up on his side, swathed in the inky darkness. She kicked him.

He groaned. Spit and blood flew from his mouth.

Lila grew taller and brighter and an ear-shattering popping sound filled the air, like a thousand screaming children. The light around her died away. She was still visible, covered in glowing blue skin, but she didn’t light the world any more. She looked the same but taller and older and a different color. She didn’t look confused or hurt. Lila was carved from marble. Slowly she folded her arms over her chest.

“Don’t hurt him,” Lila said and walked toward where he lay on the ground. Echoes lived inside her strange voice.

She had changed, fully changed, I heard it in her voice, and now I must tell her, right now, before she did anything else, what she must say. Before I could open my mouth, Diego moaned. “Help me, Lila.”

“Yes, Diego. Tell me what you want.”

“Don’t,” I said. “Take it back. Your first wish has to be for yourself, Lila,” I told her, even though I didn’t know if she
could
take it back. “I’m sorry, Diego. But she can’t do that. I will help. I will
—
”

“You’ve done more than enough, don’t you think, mi bruja?” Diego said. The Spaniard slowly got to his feet and looked from Lila to the Queen who stood behind him, and back again. He stood in shadows, and a smile, perhaps the first true smile I had ever seen on him, spread across his face. I couldn’t quite read it. He looked different, somehow, but there was so much darkness I couldn’t pinpoint it.

“Lila, wish yourself free. Grant yourself a wish that you be beholden to no-one,” I said. “Do it now!”

She swayed from side to side, blue and lovely. “First, tell me what you want, Diego,” she said, as if in a trance.

“Thank you for that boon, dulce Lila,” he said, and his voice sounded richer, more full somehow. “My wish. I want you to follow and serve my sweet Maria, the Queen of Hell.”

13

Wish Granted

“No,” I screamed as I ran toward Lila. I grabbed her hand. It was icy hot and burning cold at the same time. “Tell him no, Lila. Just say no.”

Lila’s face wore no expression. “A wish must be granted,” she said slowly, as though feeling out the words and their deep truth as she spoke. “A wish must always be granted.”

“Indeed.” Diego stepped out of the shadows. His face was not the same as the man I’d spent countless afternoons walking with. He stood still now. And he was decades and decades younger. He was not a slumped and old man, but a man in his prime. And yes he wore bruises and cuts across his body, but he looked a hundred times healthier than I had ever seen. The curse had been lifted from him and then some. He walked to stand side by side with the Queen of Hell, and took her hand. A wry smile played across his face and I saw that something was missing: his humanity. “I was wondering if we would be able to trick you, Morgan. In fact, it was easy.”